A photo tour of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

Ars visits the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and takes you along for the …

The LHC overview out of the way, we moved on to touring the on-site facilities. Brookhaven has been hosting particle accelerators for roughly 50 years, and some of the older hardware decorates the site.

The paleolithic version of ATLAS, a bubble chamber, was once used to record the traces of particles.

These included both earlier detectors, and the items that kept particles on track as they zoomed through the accelerators.

A quadrupole, which helped focus and direct bunches of charged particles.

The tour coincided with a 12-hour down period that RHIC schedules every two weeks. That meant that no collisions were taking place, and it was safe to wander through the control room and distract the staff.

Tour guide Todd Satogata points out a physicist in its natural habitat.

As you might imagine, the control software for a one-of-a-kind accelerator is rather specialized. Because the machine was inactive, most of the graphs on display were noisy, flat lines. When in operation, a "heartbeat" of particle bunches would be visible in these displays.

Nothing much to see during one of RHIC's down periods.

The room was a semicircle of work and monitoring stations. There's a lot to control, since the gold ions make their way through a a linear accelerator, and then circular accelerators that were once state of the art, but now serve to boost the speed of the particles before feeding them to RHIC.

One of the half-dozen or so stations in the RHIC control room.

Some of the hardware in the control room dates to when these earlier machines were in their prime, so there's a odd mix of current flatpanels and equipment that might have been current when I was in high school.